06/01/2026
Did you know that on this date Tennessee became a state?
Happy birthday, Tennessee!
Tennessee was first admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796 and had been a state for 21 years when Lawrence County was founded on October 21, 1817.
Tennessee's road to statehood was long and arduous. In 1784, settlers in several western counties of North Carolina (an area that encompasses twelve modern counties in East Tennessee) formed an unauthorized state government which they called Franklin, wrote a constitution, elected a governor, and proceeded to exist in a state of political limbo for the next four years.
Neither the hapless Confederation Congress nor the State of North Carolina recognized the existence of Franklin, and after years of in-fighting and quarreling, Franklin dissolved and rejoined North Carolina in 1789. A year later, the Federal government organized the territory claimed by North Carolina west of the mountains into the Southwest Territory.
A 1795 census of the Southwest Territory showed it exceeded the population requirement for statehood. In a referendum that followed the census, voters in the territory approved the motion for statehood by a margin of 6,504 to 2,562.
After the referendum, Territorial Governor William Blount called for a constitutional convention in Knoxville to draft a state constitution. The 1796 Constitution allowed all free males who owned property the right to vote, regardless of race. This was a very progressive stance for the time. According to the historian J.G.M. Ramsey, Thomas Jefferson is said to have remarked that Tennessee's 1796 Constitution was the "least imperfect and most republican of the state constitutions."
The name "Tennessee" comes from the Cherokee word "Tanasi." Although the exact meaning of the word is unclear, Tanasi was an important 18th-century Cherokee village in modern Monroe County. The village's status as a trading center resulted in Europeans naming the river after the village. Thus, the name 'Tanasi' became the Tennessee River, and subsequently the State of Tennessee.
Tennessee was admitted as the sixteenth state of the Union on June 1, 1796, by a bill signed into law by President George Washington.
